Creationism in Crisis - Another Bad Day for the Cult as Scientists Use the TOE to Understand Viral Diversity

Phylogenetic reconstruction of the global RNA virosphere

Source: Neri, Uri; Wolf, Yuri I. et al.(2022)
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

NLM Researchers Build Understanding of the Virus Universe Using Metatranscriptome Mining

A large team of researchers from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and collaborators from multiple institutions and the RNA Virus Discovery Consortium, have discovered new bacteriophage viruses including a variety of new clades that shed light on the evolution of viruses.

The most notable discovery is the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of viruses infecting bacteria that are shown to account for a much greater fraction of RNA viruses than we previously thought.

Dr. Eugene. V. Koonin, PhD, a co-author
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Despite the repeated claims of Creationist frauds, there is no sign of the Theory of Evolution being abandoned in favour of a bronze Age superstition involving magic, an unproven entity with no known modus operandum, and 'unknowable mysteries', the scientists interpret their findings using the TOE as the established scientific theory which best explains biodiversity, without the need for anything other than the operation of natural processes.

The study was conducted by data mining the results of 5,150 diverse metatranscriptomes which together contained the sequenced RNA of 2.5 million RNA viruses. The discoveries include viruses from several new taxons including two groups which constitute entirely new phyla.

The scientists have published their findings in the online journal Cell:

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Inc. Open access. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Highlights

• Metatranscriptome mining reveals a major expansion of RNA virus diversity
• A putative new phylum of RNA bacteriophages encodes distinct lysis proteins
• Partiti-like RNA phages are targeted by a bacterial CRISPR system
• Protein domains implicated in virus-host interactions are identified

Summary

High-throughput RNA sequencing offers broad opportunities to explore the Earth RNA virome. Mining 5,150 diverse metatranscriptomes uncovered >2.5 million RNA virus contigs. Analysis of >330,000 RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRPs) shows that this expansion corresponds to a 5-fold increase of the known RNA virus diversity. Gene content analysis revealed multiple protein domains previously not found in RNA viruses and implicated in virus-host interactions. Extended RdRP phylogeny supports the monophyly of the five established phyla and reveals two putative additional bacteriophage phyla and numerous putative additional classes and orders. The dramatically expanded phylum Lenarviricota, consisting of bacterial and related eukaryotic viruses, now accounts for a third of the RNA virome. Identification of CRISPR spacer matches and bacteriolytic proteins suggests that subsets of picobirnaviruses and partitiviruses, previously associated with eukaryotes, infect prokaryotic hosts.

Neri, Uri; Wolf, Yuri I. et al.(2022)
Expansion of the global RNA virome reveals diverse clades of bacteriophages
Cell, 185(21), 4023 - 4037.e18; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.08.023

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Inc. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

All in all, then, another bad day for the failing cult of Creationism as it continues to make fools of its followers and show them up to be credulous dupes, willing to believe whatever they want to be true, like impressionable children, in the face of evidence that it isn't. And science marches on, armed with probably the best-supported and certainly most useful theories in the whole body of science - the Theory of Evolution.

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link